For-profit schools prey on Mississippi veterans by getting their education assistance benefits but providing, in turn, an inferior education, charges the nonprofit Mississippi Center for Justice.

Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, more than $83 million GI Bill funds went to Mississippi schools. For-profit schools received 14 percent of the funds, although they enroll only 7 percent of the students. These trends are mirrored nationally, but Mississippi veterans are hit especially hard, as the state is chronically plagued by high rates of poverty, increasing unemployment rates, low educational success and rampant use of predatory loans, according to an 18-page report issued on Veterans Day by the Center for Justice.